At 59, Taylor may finally walk away from the fire, but he will carry it with him for the rest of his natural life.

CNN: 40 years after epic fire, convicted man to go free

Politics, he now claims in an eloquent but hardly off-the-cuff peroration, is the natural culmination of his life.

FORBES: Russian Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov: From Oligarch To President?

Britten's personal sense of alienation was a natural outcome of his life as a homosexual in a society that criminalized this, but it also arose from his views of a world in which all sorts of injustice reigned.

WSJ: The Sounds of Sacrifice | Benjamin Britten | War Requiem | Masterpiece by Stuart Isacoff

As a result, his grand landscapes, whether industrial or natural, come more vibrantly to life than the characters who inhabit them.

NEWYORKER: Liverpool

He joined a team of researchers sent to Mauritania by the Museum of Natural History in Paris, an institution he was to be associated with all his life.

ECONOMIST: Th��odore Monod